"Project GoneME is the first attempt to try moving the GNOME Desktop into a new direction. As a long years contributor and ex-GNOME Foundation member I got quite unhappy with the new direction that some core decision takers have chosen without further feedback with the community or their participants" he claims while in search for similar-thinking devs to join him. More here.

I think he has a point regarding esound, but much of his other reasoning seems somewhat flawed. Like regarding KHTML - he talks about XUL shouldn't be in the desktop - and it isn't. Both epiphany and galeon are written in GTK+, not XUL.

Between the spelling errors and the crazy assumptions, I think I almost got the point this guy's trying to make. He'd like to turn Gnome into KDE with Gtk. Right? Am I onto it? Here's some quotes:

"guarantee consistency across ... GTK+/GNOME 1.x, KDE, ... QT and so on."
"KDE is pretty nice"
"getting a KHTML port so we can finally have a native Web browser"

Hmm? Some of his ideas are pretty stupid, too. For example, he complains that XML files are too hard to read that that keypairs are better. I guess this guy's never seen gconf-editor, right? And somebody should tell him about the planned feature to remove esound and put in gstreamer. And he also says that they need "to have a handful of people who are doing GUI cleanups so everything has ... good fonts". Well, I know I want MY fonts standardized by this guy... And what is all his complaint about the button order? I didn't even notice it changed...

But remember kids, " Python and other languages should still remaing".

Please tell me this guy is ESL or something (English as a Second Language for those of you not in the know).

This is oGalaxyo.. He's known to cause seriously heated debates in the Gnome and KDE communities; and he has also made some seriously childish comments towards OSNews and Eugenia in the past. He's even been banned due to tampering with OSNews poll results if I recall correctly.

My point? He is a decent programmer, but he's very unstable in his ethics toward OS and desktop development. I wouldn't trust his fork to save my life.

After reviewing his points, I disagree with almost every single one. Obviously, I'd like gnome to improve, but not in the way he suggests. esd should be removed though. Guess this is one project that I won't be following.

Care to say why? Personally, I'd rather wait for the separation of the core browser and the interface in Mozilla than using a browser based on KHTML. I never had a good experience with Konq's rendering. Then again, I didn't used it since last year...

Everybody knows Spatial is counter-productive and a huge annoyance. Yet they still went ahead and implemented this majorly rejected way of using file folders. Spatial Nautilus needs to get buried as a disabled option in some preference menu when GNOME reaches 2.8

Is a tree. I've worked on one, but its really abandoned at the moment.

Right now, I just don't really have the free time. And it needs to be done in C with the nautilus libs to really work right.

I don't find spatial to be a huge annoyance. But then, my mouse is extremely easy to middle click, and I'm used to doing it since I use it extensively in web browsing as well. Also, spatial rocks when you're just using the keyboard.

I don't understand the argument against gconf, other than stating that it is a "Windows registry" for Gnome. Could someone fill me in on some of the arguments against gconf, outside of the one aforementioned?

As a brief note, I've used it, and I find it convenient as a developer. I simply take on the directory, set, get, do whatever, and it just works for me.

While I completely think he is off his rockers with his reasoning, I will avoid simply flaming back, and understand that he is only doing what he thinks is best.

Anyways, the first thing he releases is button order. Now, button order has gotten a lot of lip service from geeks, but let me share a small story.

I have introduced the Gnome desktop on some of the computers in my office, and I have not had one case of Windows user confused with the button order. Not one. Now granted, we are not a large office, but about a half dozen people have used these machines for more than a day to get real work done, and button order was not a problem.

Some of the questions that I had to answer:

* How do I setup my email?
* Where's Internet Explorer/Firefox (Yes, I have converted some of the sales staff to Firefox! =)).
* Where's solitaire?
* Where's Word? (OpenOffice was used, and I didn't hear any complaints)

I am not trying to suggest that this is a scientific study, but rather to point out that button order is NOT as big a deal as we make it out to be. It's something UI "gurus" and geeks like to discuss, all of us searching for empiracal evidence of the one true way.

So, if his first contribution in this project is to rearrange the button order, I feel as if the project will really accomplish nothing. There are numerious issues besides button order that could be improved, and would have a far greater impact.

On a side note: he has spammed both the OSNews and Slashdot comment areas with the same posting about his project. Spam is spam, and spammers are scum.

it's hard enough to get web designers to make sure their websites are ok in mozilla as well as IE...there's no way they will think about making sure websites work in khtml which isn't available in Windows.

"
Everybody knows Spatial is counter-productive and a huge annoyance. Yet they still went ahead and implemented this majorly rejected way of using file folders. Spatial Nautilus needs to get buried as a disabled option in some preference menu when GNOME reaches 2.8"

stop putting opinions as facts. tons of people using classic macs or beos used and liked it. so do i. so for me its very good. you have the option to just choose browse filesystem already from the application menu. gnome 2.8 will have the option to turn it off completely. so stop whining

Thank you Ali for using your brain. It is so refreshing to not have more driven from Miguel-I-am-a-moron or his similarly idiotic sidekicks.

GNOME will soon fade away as it is a dumb idea made by dumb people. And Miguel-I-am-a-moron will be in court for the next 50 years fighting Microsoft lawsuits until he learns to stop copying from them (and Apple, another litigious company).

I was actually being a little too sarcastic with regards to the resolution issue. Everyone is going to have an opinion on how software should operate. And developers can't please everyone.

I never find the save dialogue to be an inconvenience, because I just save to the desktop, and when I'm done with the document I'm working with, I can always move it to where I would like it to reside permanently(drag the file from the desktop to "documents", "pics", "movies" or whatever).

So I use the desktop as my temporary saving bed. I never used to work like that, but I adjusted. And I find my new adjustment a lot more productive. I also find that spacial nautilus has made me reevaluate the way I use the desktop and organize my file.

I'm a command line junkie. I never used to use file managers. They all sucked. But with spatial nautilus, I find my self using it all the time. My point is, little adjustments have to be made when you use any software. A lot of software wouldn't magically fit your needs. Well, I haven't found one that those for me, yet.

I have to adjust when my manner of working when I use Windows, Mac, KDE and even GNOME. That's just reality.

stop putting opinions as facts. tons of people using classic macs or beos used and liked it. so do i. so for me its very good. you have the option to just choose browse filesystem already from the application menu. gnome 2.8 will have the option to turn it off completely. so stop whining

I'm putting opinions as facts? No, the majority of people made sure that spatial design went away. And that's a fact.

Name me a successful operating system that went from default Browse mode to Spatial mode in the last 20 years? None. All left spatial and went to browse mode. Why? Because spatial mode is flawed and counter-productive. Why do you think MDI mode and Tabs were invented?

I think the Amiga OSes (OS3.X, OS4 and MorphOS) are the only OSes that are still using spatial mode.

Though I'm not a GNOME User and even this wouldn't make me one can see where this guy is coming from. To me the he points out some (well know) issues and clearly states that those are matter of oppinion - either you like GNOME's new direction - or you don't.

He's refering a lot to 'bloat' and 'fancy technology' - I think he's talking about KDE here, and since I don't feel it's bloated and actually think fancy technology is nice I'll maybe only be trying GoneME (if it gets packaged some day) to see how it does - not to use it day to day.

Otherwise i agree very much and hope he doesn't lose interest or motivation half the way so there might still be the glimpse of more unification concerning GNOME/GoneME and the rest-of-the-world (excluding MacOS that is ).
I strongly agree on his explanations about the button-order and would like to see this done to. There are gnome apss that are usefull and I don't see why I shouldn't use them on KDE - only that they button ordering confuses at times.
Oh, that's probably gonna raise a "No, the rest-of-the-world is wrong!" argument.

Is it really necessary to argue about such fundamental issues everytime there is a GNOME or KDE article linked at OSNews?

I mean isn't it possible that there are just different _oppinions_ and there's no sense it arguing about what's fact and what's not?

Seriously in my view there are simply people who like e.g. spatiality and are productive with it and there are people who don't... what's so upsetting about this?
Same goes for many other interface related issues.
And if there are some people who don't like the way GNOME handles certain tasks but like it otherwise and have a very clear vision of how it should be (to them!) - then fine, why not fork it?

Btw. telling "mdi sucks" is not the most "factual" statement there has been in recent years either...

I agree with some of his suggestions, there's lots of dependencies and quite a bit of bloat for not much gain, but his TODOs are mostly cosmetic.

The main problem with Gnome is that it doesn't have a good component and IPC system compared to KParts and DCOP. Bonobo has been a failure. I use Gnome almost exclusively these days for various reasons, but it still just seems like a bunch of random apps in contrast to an integrated desktop like KDE has.

Coincidently, I was thinking about a Gnome fork earlier today while reading a Mono thread here, but my vision was of Novell forking Gnome and using Mono as a core component.

I realize Mono is based on emca ect... but MS still has a long history of litegation ect. Although a great concept, Mono legally scares me. One of those too good to be true and waiting for the other shoe to drop things I guess.
As for Spacial...I honestly tried Gnome 2.6, and to be honest although its usable and i can get used to it. I did not find it at all intuitive. bring up my home, then say to your self..where is /home at...not anyplace in sight at all..lower left corner a little button. Yes i found it, yes i used it ect.. On the other hand if you are a keyboard junky or a CMD junky then great and well. Those people tend to be the ones who are FAR above normal user status and well into Pro User status. Yes i can navigate by CMD...and at times prefer it. Then again for light tasks i prefer a Tree that shows me my file system so i can just jump there real fast and do what i wanted. To each their own.
Now as for the ESL...you did not read. He states very clearly on his web page he is ESL, and most anyone would recognize that by default.
As for the button order..he stated Very Clearly WHY it was important. It is a standards issue, not really so much a user issue.
Far to many of you seem intent on pure fame wars. Many of you, to be blunt, left you IQ at the door when you entered this thread.

I'm not sure what exactly you guys are running, but I have a 700mhz P3 Thinkpad X-series with a 256MB of RAM and I run Debian with GNOME and have found absolutely no speed problems. It is very comparable to how Win2k ran on this machine before I picked it up and slapped Debian on it.

Some things are a bit faster actually, particularly opening a large directory of images with Nautilus and thumbnails as compared to Windows Explorer.

I always have 4 workspaces: one running Straw (rss aggregator), one running Firefox with 8 tabs or so, one running a gvim session with several buffers for various projects and another with a bunch of gnome-terminals for various things, as well as a sticky irssi window across all workspaces. Even with all this running I find my machine runs very, very well. Much nicer than with Win2k and that many apps running.

Certainly I could not have said this about GNOME 1.5 years or more ago -- it was definitely slower and less robust.

I'm sure I'll be accused of being a 'GNOME apologist', but I think those accusers (and those who say GNOME is slow) are people who haven't used GNOME lately. There is a reason 'GNOME apologists' are popping up left and right these days -- because GNOME has made huge strides in usability, stability and speed within the last year or so.

I do actually agree with most of the points that he makes but I think he's taking actions which are too extreme and the remainder are just plain stupid.

Spatial Nautilus: I see no real reason to eliminate its presence entirely as I've gotten used to it but I would like to see the mouse buttons switched at least. Left-clicking is much more natural and with the observed fact that the majority of people open a file manager window to browse, this seems like simple logic to me.

GConf: There's a very good reason why I dislike GConf -- decentralized configuration. Why can't I change the label of the computer icon from within a desktop tab in Nautilus instead? Or by just right-clicking and renaming for that matter? Although I will admit that I haven't researched the true nature of GConf and if it does indeed possess greater meaning, then I would expect it be used for that purpose, rather than hiding essential configuration options from the user.

Overall I think that the GNOME developers have to listen much more closely to user opinions and until they do, I fear that the DE will lose more users than it gains.

"The main problem with Gnome is that it doesn't have a good component and IPC system compared to KParts and DCOP"

the freedesktop replacement called dbus is being integrated completely into gnome now and might as well take over dcop in kde 4. its pretty similiar to dcop and designed to be desktop neutral and transition would be smooth if kde chooses that. bonobo isnt being used as much as kparts maybe we need a dparts?

I guess the current spatial mode might be ok and even useful for me (remembering window positions and size, new windows / folder, and also allowing me to close the previous windows easily when opening new ones to avoid window clutter) - if only the UI would make it easier and faster to go from folder A to folder B, what ever the folder structure is and where ever the folders are located. Now I feel it is a bit too much work - especially when you very well know that you could achieve the same task much faster in navigational mode.

I haven't yet figured out any other way to do that folder navigation (or what ever you call it in the spatial mode) fast except a tree view in GUI (are there other ways?), and CLI on the other hand.

Could a nice comprehensive tree view and the spatial mode perhaps be combined in some rational way? I don't see why not. Or does someone have better ideas how to fast go from folder A to folder B (or folder /etc/X/Y/Z or what ever the case may be)? I wouldn't mind if it would be an add-on or even a 3rd party hack either, as long as it works. Anybody who does it, gets my thanks.

for people who need a clue. a spatial with a tree isnt spatial anymore. its navigational. if you want that choose browse filesystem from the application menu

Umm, well, maybe? I did say that it could be an add-on. Also I was just trying to be positive about the basic good points of the spatial mode... (there are some)

But if there really are only two camps in this issue: navigational or spatial camp, I guess that I belong to the navigational camp then. And so do most people I know, whether experienced or not. Also, I have given lots of hand to hand PC help to unexperienced people, and they don't seem to have too severe problems understanding the navigational mode.

A quesation: wouldn't you spatial people ever want to use a tree to ease the managemnt your files and folders??

Another thing: If we stay at the spatial mode, I wouldn't mind if I could change the way the mouse buttons work for me when opening folders, so that I could change the default middle-button-double-click (close parent folder) to left click, and vice versa. Or is it possible currently? Why would I want that? Well, guess what, because in current spatial Nautilus I probably use the (more difficult) middle/scroll-button-mouse-click much more than the normal left button-double-click nowadays... Does continuous scroll/middle-button clicking mean ease of use? I doubt it.

Sorry, but if XFce4 would have a better file manager (XFFM), I would probably already prefer it to GNOME/Nautilus.

I always thought MDI was specifically invented to annoy people so much when trying to multitask under Windows that they'd just stick to one-app-at-a-time, and cover up Windows' dismal multitasking capabilities at the time.

What's wrong with esd? Works really great on my comp.
You need some kind of sound daemon with gstreamer, what else than esd would you use??
Everyting can play simultaneously (including OSS apps), I don't really know how it works.

>A quesation: wouldn't you spatial people ever want to use a
>tree to ease the managemnt your files and folders??

I don't know if I'm "spatial" (~180cm/70kg), but no,
I haven't touched or wanted to touch navigational
nautilus since spatial was introduced. I actually have
changed my Windows configurations to open in new windows
and hidden the location bars. That hasn't helped much,
though.

Last time I used a tree structure to manage my files was
with Dos and, a little, Windows 3.11. I used it a bit
in GNOME 1/2.4 days, but found it to be of no improvement
to my navigation (I would "jump" from location to another
with the location bar, which now is replaced by ctrl-L).

What is most annoying about the anti-spatial argumentation
is that it always starts with either
a) "it's too difficult to navigate to /etc..."
or
b) "I hate those million windows that open"

a) A _user_ is not supposed to navigate outside his/her
home directory. Any external resources (network shares etc)
should be (and AFAIK, are) available without navigating
trough the rootdir. Admins can use the browser when they
need to go trough the root (how often is that anyways?)

b) Window management can be a bitch, true. However, the
benefits of multiple open windows overcome the annoyance
of managing them. If they are properly sized and positioned
it's a far easier task to move a file from a/b/c to a/d/e
by drag and drop than it is to copy, navigate up, up, down,
down and paste. And yes, the tree can be used to d&d. But
then it's a bitch to hit the small label among 100 other
small labels compared to the open window.

Spatial nautilus needs to be taken as an additude chance
too to be useful, and not just opening in the same window
and hiding the toolbars.

I fully agree, that keeping gnome clean and skinny is necessary.
I do not realy care the buttonorder though. I also dislike
spatial nautilus. I have not faced gconf yet, but one thing Im
sure about I hate windows-registry, and human readable/editable
config files are still needed. Im happy with Firefox, and the
way it is developing, so I think the efforts to develop a native
web browser for gnome should be spent on developing other
parts of gnome instead.

What really, really, really annoys me in gtk is that in a list I cannot use the keyboard to navigate a list of items. Example: the font selector. I would assume that if I click in one of the fonts and then I press a key, it would go to the first font starting with that letter. No such luck. It annoys me to no end.

KDE does it on all menus. Small things like this is what keeps me going back to KDE apps (I run xfce as my wm so I'd like to use gtk base apps).

For those of you who don't know, this project is created by Ali Akcaagac, aka oGALAXYo. He's an infamous anti-GNOME agitator who's been trolling every single GNOME-related story for years. You can read all about him on this site:
http://geocities.com/aliakcaagac/

Miguel and Havoc insist on copying Windows, and that results in a system that uses a hacked OO system on top of C, where the smallest apps depend on 30+ libraries, and that is 2 orders of magnitude slower than WindowMaker (and needs ten times the memory and disk space.)

While I agree with Ali about the button order and bloat, I quite like the spacial Nautilus. Firstly, Jamie McCracken announced that he'll be maintaining his own version of Nautilus with enhancement patches (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2004-July/thread.html) and now this desicion from Akcaagac. As a Gnome user and translator, I just wish Gnome devs wake up and listen to users. I hope these two incidents will help Gnome more.

Actually, Havoc insists on NOT just copying Windows. He says in a number of places that if we copy windows, we'll always be trailing and we'll never be better. Linux/KDE/GNOME actually have to innovate; copying Windows is pretty much a dead end and not as interesting technologically.

"Havoc also raised the issue of diverging options for the free desktop world: either to emulate Windows, or build something alternate on its own terms. It was his view that it's easier to win on real user value than to be forever playing catchup with "technical castles of unbounded size." This despite the fact that many open source developers tend to think it's easier to copy features."

Geez, the person who made galaxy-watch is sick, even more so that oGalaxyO himself.

Actually, I even think he raises quite some valid points.

- Spatial Nautilus: a combination of a Finder/Tracker like file manager and applications like iPhoto or iTunes would be great, yet Nautilus isn't like Finder/Tracker. It's too bloated, it has too big icons, it doesn't remember icon positions, it doesn't have a window-auto-size feature, ...

- GConf-Editor is bad. I don't think that an approach of removing features (== moving them to GConf-Editor) is a good approach to usability. If you do think so, please end this discussion with these two commands:

cp ./helloworld /sbin/init
reboot -f

- A KHTML port is a good idea. While it appears to be possible to use GTK+ for scrollbars, this seems to be impossible for buttons, edit boxes and dropdown lists. This makes that any Gecko-based browser does not blend into Gnome nicely. As Apple has shown. KHTML can be made to use native widgets.

I agree with every single point expressed by the guy. I'm trying so hard to make gnome my default desktop, but every time I set it up I find something is wrong with the overall concept. according to my personal tastes, obviously. I stick to fluxbox and kde as my desktops.

...uhm I'm not thinking gnome directly steals ideas from apple's osx, but it's strange enough to see it is so heavily inspired by their point of view... and so lacking touch with the userbase.

I would try GoneMe anytime. One thing is for sure, this guy has chosen the hard path, I wouldn't foresee many distros offering GoneME... maybe hacking dropline to install it could be a way.

Do we really need another environment? I was hopefull that freedesktop could unite the efforts but I see that this is not a concern for most anyone. I am a developer who would like to have some coherent development plataform. Some times choice is ulseless.

What annoys me the most about GNOME (and every other GUI environemnt out there) is that they allow applications to have windows, the worst problem is that they allow applications to render a file/working space.

This really is the job of the GUI to handle, applications should just handle the data IN the files.

First oGalaxyO is not a troll or flamer.
second the gconf is orrible
it's fine the schema approach but the implementation is bloated.
third the spatial nautilus is not a feature but a specific
intention of developers who didn't considerate the users.
the last thing
i do not agree with ogalaxyo for python libglade and mono.
end

Wise words from Australia's treasurer:
"The most important thing is to get the flame right," he said. "In this modern day and age, forking them is a bad idea."
(humour for the Aussies, I know, but he did say it and it's oddly relevant. If you don't believe me visit http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,10201180%255E42...)

I think Gecko is more advanced than KHTML at the moment, *but*, KHTML seems to have much more momentum. I was astonished by the changes and speed differences between KHTML in KDE 3.1 and 3.2, and I am pleasently suprised by all the changes in KDE 3.3 beta1.

Apple seems to have done a lot of good with KHTML development with Safari. I think that this rate, KHTML will catch up with Gecko by KDE 4.0, and will have a much smaller and tighter codebase to extend things for the future-- things like XHTML 2.0, all of CSS 3.0, xforms, etc..

Good luck to him. I switched from Gnome 2.4 to KDE 3.2 cause I didn't like the direction Gnome was heading. I agree on every point he states (though not on Python).
However the key point here is *speed*. When I switched, it seemed to me like a new world. KDE was *much* faster than Gnome, and all the bloated and strange things in KDE 3.1 were gone. It'll be hard now to make me switch again, but I really do hope you Ali can bring Gnome on the right road again.

"KHTML will catch up with Gecko by KDE 4.0, and will have a much smaller and tighter codebase to extend things for the future-- things like XHTML 2.0, all of CSS 3.0, xforms, etc.."

Perhapas by 4.0. But right now, Gecko is WAY ahead. KHTML's "compliance" is on the line with IE right now- that is, it gets messed up with lots of advanced CSS stuff. Gecko, on the other hand, handles CSS 1-2.1 flawlessly and even handles large parts of the CSS3 spec (can you say "opacity property"). I still maintain that KHTML is a slower rendering engine too.

Oh, and for the rest of you, a question. I prefer spatial nautilus. So should I fork gnome now so that I can have a non-non-spatial fork?

"I'm putting opinions as facts? No, the majority of people made sure that spatial design went away. And that's a fact."

If its a fact you are able to refer us to that fact, right? I see it stated many times here, but i don't see any references. Frankly, i think it is very hard to proof the majority of GNOME users prefers non-spatial, so i'm really looking for some GOOD references.

"Sorry, but if XFce4 would have a better file manager (XFFM), I would probably already prefer it to GNOME/Nautilus."

The file manager is configurable. I had success with XFE among new users. XFE is basically very Explorer-alike. Maybe you like it? IIRC the website is http://xfe.sf.net or search at Freshmeat.

I'd rather see this "news" from this person not posted here because
1) He's been trolling for years on GNOME. Because of this, it is not likely this is something productive as well.
2) It is spam. The person is spamming it on other websites, like Slashdot.
3) It does not create a healthy discussion at all, rather a flamewar.
4) We'll see when there's something productive after a while instead. Anybody can claim they have "forked GNOME" because anyone can.

I avoid these two like the plague, bloated, slow, complex, mind-numbing options and icons, XP wannabes, totally defeating the UNIX concept.

Everything is based on looks, eyecandy, and titillating objects on the desktop. Tmagine a good looking car with a slow engine that gives you bad mileage, one that breaks down constantly at a drop of a hat. Just walk into any forum and witness the problems of these two in any Linux distro, the fixes are also bloated, and complex, and don't warrant any assurance. Yes, we like to talk about Windows, but more and more, we are becoming just like it.

Instead on pulling resources to increase the speed of the OS, and easyness of package installation, we waste the resources on looks and frivolous tricks.

I agree 100% with the author of this article, at last, somebody took the bull by the horns and faced reality.

Galaxy seems to have a very similar attitude like the cdrecord/cdrtools guy, Jörg Schilling. I feel that they are very fast in making wrong assumptions and use very hard words to express their opinion.
He's right about esd though. On Gentoo i always unmerge it by hand, and after every update it's in again. Hey, we have GStreamer and Linux users have ALSA too (i know they're not the same, but both can do what esd did).

Basicly what GNOME was trying to achieve here is cloning MacOSX 1:1
Seems he hasn't spent even 1 minute working with Mac OS X.
And he has some spelling problems.
I rather think he tries to make GoneME a GTK-based KDE. And that would make no sense. If i wanted KDE, i would install it (i even think i'm going to do this because people say speed has improved - but it's so bloated).

Many users suffer from the speed problems though. But he's very inspecific what he's going to do about that, and the lag mostly comes from GTK (and the GTK folks are already doing something about it).

And spatial nautilus makes browsing so much faster - and you've got so much more real screen estate.

Ok, here are a couple of my problems with this. Yes, many people don't like spatial nautilus, you can change that easily, that doesn't mean it should be thrown out. Other OS's offer that choice, and I like the choice being there. Isn't linux about choice, and not having it dictated to you?

The comment this guy makes about having all your pics, music, vids, what not in a folders not more than 3 clicks into your filesystem, is not what people want? This guy spends too much time in the closet, (not sexuality), and doesn't operate with real "users" enough. I do Windows support, and the "My Documents" folder is the MOST used folder in Windows period. Why? Because it is simple, easy and fast, and most users truely do not know the filesystem NOR do they WANT TO!!!! Do you have any idea how many people I have had to explain what the C: drive is too? I am talking about people that have been using computers for years, not newbies. People want simplicity, that is why Mac's are so popular, and why Windows post 95 is so popular. It makes it easy. That has been *nixes problem, the difficulty in use.

This guy is not going to solve that problem, his goals are to turn gnome into what he wants it to be. Not make it the most usable gui for linux that will make it steal Mac and Windows slush heads. (Though I doubt he wants them using Linux)

> Perhapas by 4.0. But right now, Gecko is WAY ahead. KHTML's "compliance" is on the line with IE right now- that is, it gets messed up with lots of advanced CSS stuff. Gecko, on the other hand, handles CSS 1-2.1 flawlessly

Erm, no. KHTML handles a lot of standards compliant stuff nearly as well as Gecko. There are many parts of CSS2 that KHTML and Gecko interpret differently, however. Yeah, that's why CSS 2.1 has until very recently been still a work in progress. Gecko handles a lot of real life broken webpages better than KHTML. *That* is the area that KHTML has been improving on a lot as of late.

> even handles large parts of the CSS3 spec (can you say "opacity property").

KHTML supports opacity as well, and has for years. Indeed, it was the first of the four major rendering engines to implement it, and it was based on -khtml-opacity that Mozilla and Opera implemented their own custom CSS properities. It was only after this that it eventually became part of CSS3. Safari currently implements as much CSS3 as Gecko does; however, they implement different parts of the specs.

> I still maintain that KHTML is a slower rendering engine too.

Debatable in terms of load speed of pages. In my experience, it requires significantly less memory than Gecko does however.

Currently Spatial is fairly integrated with the browser, and that works rather well. At any time you can right click a folder and select "Browse Folder" to get to a browser view. The drawback I see to this is that the browser is slow to load, and the browser isn't integrated with spatial. There is no comparable "Open in Spatial" option in the browser that would allow you to go back.

If we were to replace the full browser with a simple tree app in the integration in spatial, replace "Browse Folder" with "View Tree", and have the tree as a simple quick way to open spatial nautilus windows, you would have a much faster, and much more integrated solution.

I don't really have much respect for Ali because of his stubbornness and all the FUD he is spreading but I think he has some points. I find funny that he believe that GNOME copied OS X for button orders but "forgot" that all other WM/DEs are copying from Windows but I think the cleanups and the de-bloatness would be welcome. Like I said previously, I am using a custom "lite" version of GNOME because I hate the bloatness... and I don't use KDE for that reason (example: I don't want to get kdemultimedia and ALL the apps coming with it when I only want juk... I wouldn't mind if kdemultimedia were only libraries, though). Anyway, I wish him luck, hoping that he didn't only spewed hot air.

They don't want to adopt it because it is in KDE, and they are naturally partisan; they won't listen to reason, about it being a smaller, faster, better engine that integrates much better with the rest of the desktop and has a better licence than the mozilla licence.

However, Gnome has a track record of copying OS X at every opportunity, so perhaps the way forward is to encourage the Gnome folks to copy Apple, and not mention KDE at all? I'm pretty sure they would fall all over themselves to adopt KHTML if it were just Apple using it, in their minds.

To all the WindowMaker/Fluxbox fans who keep saying GNOME/KDE are bloated: get over it. GNOME and KDE are application frameworks as much as they are user environments. Yes, that means they must have lot's of functionality for applications to use. But on the flip-side, it means that GNOME/KDE applications are much smaller, because they all use shared functionality.

What apps do you WindowMaker/Fluxbox folks use anyway? Unless they are KDE or GNOME apps, there is a very high probability that there is tons of redundant code in your system, because each app has to reinvent a lot of common functionality, instead of sharing it. Now, if you like WMaker/Fluxbox for the UI, then fine. But the "KDE and GNOME are bloated" claim is not something that makes a great deal of sense.

I do not think anyone in Gnome objects over someone porting
KHTML over to Gtk. Ali or anyone else is free to port it,
and if folks adopt that technology then great.

I do not think you will see anyone in Gnome asking for more
bloat, I think the opposite is the case. It is simpler to
complain than to do something about it. Profiling and tuning are arts that not everyone is willing to do.

Today more folks are using Mozilla though; The engine is
there, and with things like the tiny profile of Mozilla, the
memory and footprint issues are solved.

Researching new directions in gnome is something that we have always encouraged. Everyone does it everyday: people actively work with branches and people actively try new ideas. For every application that we ship today five died out of lack of maintenance, vision, features, etc. It is an iterative process.

i keep most all of them installed because i want to be able to show Windows users that Linux gives a choice of desktops, and i give a brief description of each one as i log on to them, explaining Gnome & KDE are more full featured and user friendly and i keep Blackbox,xfce,windowmaker explaining that these are lighter and require more user input but when running intensive applications a lighter desktop helps to give more resources to CPU intensive applications...

depending on what i am doing will determine what sort of desktop i want to use, like when i am just taking it easy i will go with either Gnome or KDE and play solitare or mahjongg, while listening to music with XMMS, but when it is time for work i easily logoff and back on to one of the light WMs & open OpenOffce to a custom template i built.

people should not be so narrow-minded about what desktop to use, "heck" install several and use them all (only one at a time)

I recall this topic being brought up on the desktop-devel list for GNOME a year or so ago. Some developers were considering or were in the early process of porting KHTML to use GTK+ widgets for GNOME. The GNOME developers were not hostile toward KHTML; rather, they had already put a lot of effort in their integration with Gecko and Mozilla, including making Gecko accessible through ATK and at-spi. So, the GNOME developers were more inclined to stick with Mozilla because a lot of the integraton work had already been done there.

Pekwm, firefox, thunderbird, gkrellm, vim/gvim, streamtuner and Beep most frequently used apps. None of these are KDE/GNOME apps, so you mean this means a lot of redundancy? Where?
Well, let's see. On your desktop, you've got 3 different toolkits (GTK 1.x, GTK 2.x, and XUL). You've got at least two networking libraries (Beep must roll it's own abstraction on top of sockets, and so must Firefox and Thunderbird). You've got at least three four text-editor widgets (Mozilla one, GTK+ 1.x one, GTK+ 2.x one, and gvim's). Neither streamtuner nor Beep are native gstreamer apps, so they each have their own sound layers as well.

Now, compare this to a comparable KDE setup, which would consist of Kwin, Konqueror, KMail, Kate, and Noatun. In total, you're talking about one toolkit (Qt3), one networking library (KDE's), one text-editor widget plug-in (choose from qt's, kate's, or vim's), and one audio layer (aRts). The advantage increases when you run additional apps. Kopete uses the same network library as KMail or Konqueror. KHelp uses the same HTML widget as Konqueror and KMail. Everyone uses the same remote filesystem library (KIO). As you keep piling on the applications (what about office program, CD burner, etc?) the marginal cost for the desktop environments is much lower than for the stand-alone application environments.

good luck buddy, but you won't have it.
just because you don't like button order [aka doesn't seem windows XP and you also don't like this and this] you do a fork.
what's wrong in switching to KDE?
afterall it's GPL and it more Windows-like.
So just use KDE and not your fork. What is more interesting is that people talk about combining the two DEs and you just make another one.
Why don't you join XPde: http://www.xpde.com/
enough with "oh they ate my meatball" forks

Changing the Buttonorder back to normal again.
OK, good luck in this one, try to convince all developers which have GNOME projects to do this. Because you're certainly insane if you intend to do it yourself. In the end you'll have the biggest havoc someone will ever witness because only a small part of the GNOME based apps will have the button order _you_ like.

Spatial Nautilus.
OK, so you don't like spatial. Why don't you start your own GNOME distro (not a fork) which starts with navigational mode by default? Oh wait, that would just sound silly, right?

GConf did upset plenty of people in the past.
You surely don't sound like a programmer, the GConf API saves alot of dumb work, manipulating configuration files for every project you do is plain dumb. Every advanced platform has and should have it. Look at java, one of the cool things about java 1.4 was their new properties model, which is an hierarquical one. Unlike INI files. The "windows registry" syndrome which ppl babble against GConf claim is purely FUD. Win registry has two problems: a) it's binary based b) you store hardware details there. Other then that it is a perfectly good system for saving preferences. The win registry pollution is the same as you have in your home, where you have 1000 .dot files.

Control Center is also a thing to worry about. Control Center is also a thing to worry about. How often have you been upset that you need to launch one capplet after another only to change preferences.
Never, don't even know what you're talking about...

Removing a lot of bloat is also a point to discuss.
Could you be more vague please?

Worth of conversation is also getting a KHTML port so we can finally have a native Web browser rather than using Mozilla or Firefox.
Khtml is far behind gecko engine, nevertheless I wish you good luck.

Removing unnecessary things such as esound.
I vote for that!

The GNOME HIG is partially adoptable here but there are parts that need to be reworked.
Agreed.

In the end this has so much FUD and so little interesting features that it isn't funny. Especially not worth creating a fork for.

Actullay that's two. Gtk2 and XUL. I'm sure you know better than me, but firefox is built with --enable-toolkit-gtk2 (not 100% sure what it does though). Gtk 1.x is not installed though, that's for sure

2. "Neither streamtuner nor Beep are native gstreamer apps, so they each have their own sound layers as well."

Not sure what you mean here. A) I'm not a Gnome-user, therefore I do not use gstreamer. B) Streamtuner does not play any audio, AFAIK, it just redirects the stream to beep or streamripper (Console app).

3. "Now, compare this to a comparable KDE setup,"

Woha, hold your horses...
I never argued that KDE apps were bigger than my equivalents in them self, and obviously the advantage of shared code will aggregate with the number of apps that are loaded. However, I doubt that the benefit will make up for the bulkiness kde brings to begin with, with such a small number of applications. I will have a check on this though, as I'm about run KDE for some testing anyway.

4. "choose from qt's, kate's, or vim's"

That's interesting. Do you mean that the text-editor widget plug-ins of qt and kate are optional?

5. "what about office program, CD burner, etc?"

I'm a mental Vim/LaTeX and sc covers my needs for the most of the time. CD-burning is made from CLI.. or xcdroast.

6. "the marginal cost for the desktop environments is much lower than for the stand-alone application environments."

As I said before, that may very well be true. But I think that is highly dependant on how many different apps you have loaded. But we'll see. I'll give KDE another test-run.

No it doesn't, because if you don't strictly follow one metaphor, the interface gets unpredictable if you don't know it by heart.

That's the problem, I know. That's why I said I hope that Dave Camp, or someone else, could, perhaps, achieve a clean, working implementation of tree view in the spatial mode Nautilus. I don't know how well it would be possible though? If not, well, then I choose the navigation model - if I have to choose between the two models and there is no possible combination.

I've been very open-minded and used the spatial Nautilus for some time now. I know by experience that the navigational model is easier and faster for me.

However, let me restate this once again: even now the so-called spatial Nautilus is maybe only 2/3 spatial. It does have some navigational features even now too. Why? Simply because people do seem to need those navigational features too.

Usability is not the same as spatial... Thinking like that would be blind dogmatism.

Maybe sometimes usability could even be a combination of the best features of different models? Impossible?

Actullay that's two. Gtk2 and XUL. I'm sure you know better than me, but firefox is built with --enable-toolkit-gtk2 (not 100% sure what it does though). Gtk 1.x is not installed though, that's for sure
Nevermind. I forgot they had a GTK 2.x version of gvim. Still, that's two space-hogging toolkits compared to one. Firefox with --enable-toolkit-gtk2 causes XUL to use GDK for rendering, and Pango for fonts. I doesn't actually cause it to use GTK+ widgets.

Not sure what you mean here. A) I'm not a Gnome-user, therefore I do not use gstreamer. B) Streamtuner does not play any audio, AFAIK, it just redirects the stream to beep or streamripper (Console app).
My point is that if you use more than one application for audio, you'll get redundancy unless you have a common audio library. That means the minute you fire up a jukebox program, you've got two audio libraries loaded.

I never argued that KDE apps were bigger than my equivalents in them self, and obviously the advantage of shared code will aggregate with the number of apps that are loaded.
The whole point of an application platform is to mitigate the costs of having a wide-variety of apps. If you've got an extremely-limited selection of apps that you use, then you'll probably end up ahead with the fluxbox approach. However, if you use lot's of different apps, it's better to have them share a common set of platform libraries, even if that causes the base system to get bigger. Thus, you can't really say it's bloated, because it includes the functionality applications would have to reinvent anyway. On my SuSE system, I've got a ton of KDE applications loaded (Konqueror, KDevelop, Quanta, KOffice, Kontact, Kopete, K3b lots of utilities, some graphics apps, etc), and those apps, along with the base KDE system and Qt, takes up about 250MB of binaries and libraries. I doubt you could get a comparable set of programs in Fluxbox in less than that amount of space.

I hope he manages to gain a large enough momentum to change some things and bring some respect back to the Gnome project from its _real_ users, and not some imaginary, theoretical Joe User who doesnt care in using Macs let alone Linux and Gnome, but whom the project still tries to please in the first place, blinded by world (desktop) domination delusions. and leaving its current and loyal users behind who helped to make it what its today.

Everybody saw what happened to Xfree86, and how quickly literally _everybody_ left it back in the dust as a usable alternative emerged. My guess is that this will happen in a similar way when the Gnome Project keeps to ignore its community and its wishes as it does now, because, when oGALAXYo's idea catches on, there will be an alternative. XFree86 did in the end not succeed with its authoritative and imposing development model, and arrogance towards its community, and failed, and so should the current Gnome.

Project keeps to ignore its community and its wishes as it does now, because, when oGALAXYo's idea catches on, there will be an alternative. XFree86 did in the end not succeed with its authoritative and imposing development model, and arrogance towards its community, and failed, and so should the current Gnome.

Oh come on. Gnome has _not_ been arrogant toward the community. The Foundation has been under direct assault by people like oGalaxyo for some time regarding these issues, and the Foundation handles these people with dignity. oGalaxy on the other hand never handles any dispute with dignity.

If you read carefully (which I doubt you did) you would figure out that there is nothing wrong with GNOME as project, idea and philosophy. I was talking about certain people who sit in upper positions who cause an harrassment on others by namecalling them, slandering them etc. What you have read from me for years (thanks for confirming that I am at least part of GNOME for years, even the way you did it isn't the way I would have seen it) then you may understand that these problems are there for years as well. As long nothing changes nothing much will improve.

I am talking here about people, developers, contributors, users who got permanently taken to the shambles, where people are being talked in the back and stuff like this. This all has nothing to do with wanting to fork GNOME (even if I had the idea in doing so a couple of times).

People mistake features such as rounded windows, drop down shadows, transparency, and the most preetiest icon's ever to be user friendly. In the end these are just cheap tricks/gizmo's to convince Linux/KDE/Gnome converts from Windows into thinking we really have something here.

The Linux desktop is not half as mature as Windows XP graphical interfaces in design and implementation.

Throughout Gnome and KDE there are too many options that end users and converts from Windows XP in this generation could not hope to understand, nor should they.

"Throughout Gnome and KDE there are too many options that end users and converts from Windows XP in this generation could not hope to understand, nor should they.
"

stick with windows. saying that gnome has too many options makes your whole comment worthless. Linux people develop UI for them to use. if you want to stick with windows nobody is threatening you to convert. you dont have anything to say in here

GNOME itself wants to adopt all types of technology which somehow scares me e.g. a lot of talks about Storage, a lot of talks about MONO and Python and so on

Sounds pretty conservative to me. Think ahead to the time when Longhorn is released. Advanced search capabilities, extreme integration, all kinds of new and exciting features, and a developer's utopia. From the sound of it, you're proposing to strip down Gnome to the bare minimum...in fact, you're proposing to go _backwards_. What kind of a position will it be in to compete with Longhorn when the time comes if Gnome follows your philosophy?

I'm sorry but I would agree with other posters that you come off sounding bitter. I disagree with virtually every one of your points (especially about spatial nautilus...have you used it extensively at all? I find myself pissed off when I have to use navigational now) and I really think that if Gnome were to follow your philosophy it would be 0 steps forward and 10 steps back. We've had GoneME already...it was Gnome 2.2. Now we're in 2004 and we're using Gnome 2.6, which I find _much_ more usable.

I'd like to wish you luck in your project, but I really think developer's talents are better used elsewhere like helping Gnome in adapting to changing technologies and preparing for the future, not looking back on the past. Like it or not, progress will occur and whether you agree or not with the masses, this is the direction the project has taken. All you can do is voice your opinion. Forking, in my opinion, is just petty.

Metic wrote:
Sounds good! I hope he finds a good way to implement it that keeps the interface clear and usable.

The idea is to have a listview, which acts like a tree. So you have those arrows to expand a folder right inside of the window. The root of the tree would be the location of the folder and if you doubleclicked some folder, it would open in a new folder window. So it does not break the spatial metaphor at all.

As for the rest of your statement, Julian already summed it up very well. Combining features of both metaphors will only make both less predictable, which is really bad for usability. So the GNOME idea isn't to offer only spatial folders or only browsers or only a combination of both, but to offer both and make it easy to use whatever works best for a certain situation. Maybe it's not easy enough yet, but of course there can always be improvements to this in the future. After all, GNOME 2.6 was the first version ever which went this path and I believe that they already did quite an impressive job on it.
Currently you can activate the "Browse Filesystem" item to get a new browser instance whenever you need one (move it to your panel for faster access) and if you want to open a specific folder in the browser, you can chose "Browse Folder" from the context menu. It's not possible right now to open a spatial folder window from within a browser, so maybe that would be one possible improvement to discuss about.
I don't like the idea of a "mode toggle" as in OSX, because that would make it even harder to understand that spatial folders and browsers are supposed to be differently acting objects, not just two modes of the same kind of object. However, what I could imagine would be a way to quickly open a folder in the browser while closing the current folder and the other way around. This would act almost like a mode toggle, but keep the separation clear.

Where did you read that? I have read the maillist thread that was posted a while ago and even Havoc was not against the idea. Miguel might be the leader of the priject but he is far from representing the mind of every GNOME developer. The obsession with Mono is one proof: many GNOME developers simply don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole.

--enable-toolkit-gtk2 causes XUL to use GDK for rendering
Thank you for the explanation.

That means the minute you fire up a jukebox program, you've got two audio libraries loaded.

Ok. I see, point taken.

really say it's bloated, because it includes the functionality applications would have to reinvent anyway.

Not to be inflammatory, but isn't that a bit of sophistry?
If I have to load a lot of libs containing code that I have no use for because I don't use any programs that use it, isn't that bloat to me? One man's gain, another man's loss, I guess.

Point is, if we leave KDE for a moment, that I can use a low-end box pretty much without penalty (ok, a little patience is needed) with the described setup. A couple of months ago I tried to use gnome on it (300Mhz 128MB) and it was absolutely useless, slooow is just the beginning of the description. I never tried KDE on that box, but I doubt it would have fared that much better.

As for the number of toolkits: I don't know how much better Konqueror has become, but at least in the past konqi was less than perfect, so for some sites you HAD to keep mozilla/phoenix/firebird/firefox around anyway. How's that for bloat? Gtk in some form + xul + qt. Yummy. So in my experience the theoretical advantage of sharing a single toolkit between the apps, still is quite -- theoretical. This will certainly get better as time passes on, but for now things are as they are.

To return to you original question What apps do you WindowMaker/Fluxbox folks use anyway?

You got answears from one at least, and it turned out that the situation wasn't quite as bad as you wanted to make it look like. As you noted before, in the end it all boils down to what apps you really use. So you got all those programs loaded, but I think you make the same mistake as a lot of people propagating for those fancy DE's. You assume that everyone has a computer that is as fast as yours, and that they want the same apps as you do.

I can use vim for tasks that you use three different programs for. So when you say I doubt you could get a comparable set of programs in Fluxbox in less.. the question is "comparabel in what way?" In functionality or in functionality *and* apperance? I.e Vim and aspell is not as sexy as openoffice, and not as easy for the recent windows refugee, but they can pretty much do the same job. And that with significantly lower system requirements. Furthermore, as my needs quite probably are not the same as yours, why would I want the same setup as you?

I see lot of guys posting here running Ali down because he's forking GNOME and not contributing to it (sticking to their stringent although lop-sided IMHO, rules).

And to think GNOME is the flag-bearer of everything open and free and the power to do things "differently". Otherwise, I for one, would have been glad to see all the existing GNOME developers join KDE band rather than start over with a new desktop of their own.

If I have to load a lot of libs containing code that I have no use for because I don't use any programs that use it, isn't that bloat to me? One man's gain, another man's loss, I guess.
I suppose it depends on your definition of bloat. I think most people consider something bloated when it is a lot larger than it needs to be. When the extra size is taken up by features that are needed in for a product's target market, and the code is not such that these features take up much more space than expected, then you can't say that's bloat. You're welcome to criticize the software for not being optimal in situations where the user has a much smaller set of requirements than the general population, but that's something very different than saying that the software is bloated. Look at it this way: is GCC bloated because you don't need it's full C++ compliance and powerful optimizer to generate good code for your PDA? Or is it just overkill for your requirements?

You got answers from one at least, and it turned out that the situation wasn't quite as bad as you wanted to make it look like.
It'd be nice if you didn't take statements out of context:

"What apps do you WindowMaker/Fluxbox folks use anyway? Unless they are KDE or GNOME apps, there is a very high probability that there is tons of redundant code in your system, because each app has to reinvent a lot of common functionality, instead of sharing it."

I never set out to prove WindowMaker/Fluxbox was bloated. All I had to prove was that full environments using these WMs have a high probability of having redundant code. Even if the few applications you listed was all you used, there was still quite a bit of redundancy in there. In a more common desktop, where you might be running more things (address book, email client, etc), that probability goes up.

You assume that everyone has a computer that is as fast as yours, and that they want the same apps as you do.
No I don't. I never said that WindowMaker/Fluxbox/etc had no place. I said that proponents of those programs couldn't really levy the "bloated" claim against KDE and GNOME. KDE and GNOME have to serve a much wider variety of users than do WindowMaker/Fluxbox. As a result, they have to provide more general functionality. This doesn't make them bloated, just targetted at a different market.

So when you say I doubt you could get a comparable set of programs in Fluxbox in less.. the question is "comparabel in what way?" In functionality or in functionality *and* apperance?
Just functionality, if you consider that features designed to serve less knowledgable users to also be functional elements.

why would I want the same setup as you?
I never said you'd want the same setup as me. I said that you cannot justifiably criticize GNOME and KDE of being bloated because serve users with a wider range of needs than yourself.

One size does not fit all. It's as simple as that.
It was you who implied that one-size fit all, by claiming that KDE and GNOME were bloated. Systems that need to be general are not bloated. There may be solutions that are more optimal for a specific niche of uses, but bloated doesn't mean that. It means that something is too large/too complex for what it does.

Very good points. I agree 100% with what you said.
If we look at what happened to Xfree86, and how fast it happened.
We could possibly see Gnome dead by the end of the year
Replaced by GoneME. Provided GoneME can deliver some results.
And I'd realy love to see that.
There is nothing worse than developers (Gnome devs) that completely ignore users and force their own ideas how users should use their desktops.
I couldn't word it better than you.
"imaginary, theoretical Joe User", very nicely put.
The fact is that Gnome project took dirrection as if Gnome was suddenly going to have 100% market share on every hardware and OS platform, and every grandma and grandpa are going to use it.
Meanwhile they (Gnome) left all the long time Linux users with a dumbified desktop, Windows like registry configuration, the most pathetic file manager ever seen in modern day software(Nautilus) and file-browse dialog that made me lough when I saw it in Gnome 2.6 (those buttons that show your location, what the hell is that?) and that's sub Windows 3.1 level feature-wise.
The fact remains that no Joe User is using Gnome (or Linux for that matter) right now and will not be in forseeable future. Gnome needs to deliver features and configuration options for it's current user base which is long time Linux power users.

I also wanted to say good luck to Ali and I wish good luck to the GoneME project.
It's about time someone brought some sense into Gnome and made it usable again.
I agree (after reading Ali's GoneME website) with every point he raised.
Gnome needs those changes so it appeals to power users again.
It's the only hope for its survival.
Grandmas can go and buy Macs if they want something easy and dumb
Don't dumbify my Linux!
Long live GoneME!

I like the direction of Gnome as a user but like with the GUI the whole has to be kept simple as Rainer and oGalaxyo has pointed out with libraries and sound deamonds under Gnome. Keep the base simple and uniform so that programs developed for the Gnome desktop utilise the same resources and can interoperate easily with each other.
It also will be nice to have Epiphany without the need for all of Mozilla to be installed but for me it is fairly irrelevent cause I use Opera and can uninstall Mozilla/Epiphany.

Also I would like more centralised preference settings alla Windows style of control panel or other for hardware/software settings. At the moment Gconf is a little vague in it's structure. Still it could be tuned to work nicely and it would be great if you could control X (and other) settings from within it and also have Gconf give you the name/location of the text/xml file it's changing with the setting selections being manipulated (would help new comers understand the configuration structure of Linux if they so chose).

It's getting there and speed of Gnome is getting better and for folder navigation a few folders deep Spatial navigation has great benfits over heirachial. If I want to dig deep into the systems guts which isn't very often, then I use the Navigational Nautilus version with a really hard to use (NOT) right click of my mouse and selecting it from the menu.

Let's keep in mind the vision of Gnome before slamming it. To make Linux desktop use easy for the average computer user. With that, I think Gnome is succeeding where no-one else has been able on Linux.

If your wondering about how to use Linux as a power user, try learning CLI. You still have the terminal interface to CLI within Gnome if you want and it would seem to be the easiest way to prove your worth as a Linux Power user. Geez, even Windows has a terminal CLI interface and I bet many so called Windows "Power Users" have no idea how to use it or CLI in a rescue situation to fix Windows. The tech support people don't they always suggest re-installing the OS as the fix for all times. Bah Humbug to them all (-:

Can't you just move to KDE and leave GNOME alone? I'm sure the KDE project would appreciate someone of your AMAZING SKILLS much more than those supposed ingrates at the GNOME project.

It's obvious with about half a minute of reading the Galaxy has no idea whatsoever about half the issues, and has no conception whatsoever about future extensibility or maintainability. The only good thing I can say is that he's obviously never going to be able to code this, so we don't really have to worry about the fork.

Yeah, sure, let's see him rewrite basically all the underlying systems. Give me a break. For damned sure anything he puts out is going to be a massive GUI mess, given how little understanding he has of the issues (his reasons come down to "looks like X", "I don't like Y"). His bloat rant is especially laughable.

The _constructive_ thing to do would be to work within the framework of the original GNOME project. You can optimize to your heart's content, port KHTML, and write options for what system-level dirs you want to see. But, of course, when you have a huge ego, the only way is your way.

After reading the article and the various background I came to look at the comments hoping to figure out if ali had valid points or not. Unfortunatly, I found a stream of short posts doing little more than attacking the individual making the comments or blatantly asserting he was wrong. Mixed in seemed to be a few individuals like me curious about his points but not really knowing enough to comment definitively combined with some dogmatic assertions about UI. Perhaps the issue is that these arguments have already been thoroughly refuted in other forums and people are tired of making detailed rebutals. I can certainly appreciate this position but if you are too lazy to do anything besides assert the poster is wrong why post at all? At least you could include a link to where this issue has been addressed in detail.

I was particularly bothered by the host of posts who dismissed the issue by attacking ali. He is accused of being a spamer or otherwise annoying but not much evidence is cited besides posting to both osnews and slashdot (ohh the horror two online communities might discuss the same topic). My favorite was the post attacking him by saing "He's known to cause seriously heated debates in the Gnome and KDE communities." Of course we could never trust someone whose ideas were controversial. Even if his online behavior was completly disgusting this particular declaration is polite and dispasionate and deserves to be addressed on the merits. In the 21st century we should have realized that the truth of an idea should be evaluated independently of the person who originates it.

Many of the UI debates are just silly. Quite clearly the same UI is not equally good for every person and posts about how you can and can't use spatial browsing well simply aren't going to change this fact. Furthermore statements like users 'shouldn't' be browsing to /etc are just silly. Are people who choose to do alot of browsing/reading of configurations (like I do) while in user mode violating the ten commandments of computer use? Perhaps there is some case to be made that computer users who prefer other ways of organizing their desktop should be coerced to the spatial way but some argument for this needs to be given. There is certainly the preception among many gnome users that they are being coerced into one UI style (just because they can change some config options isn't a convincing objection...the very issue at hand here is ease of use) and it seems some justification of this policy or evidence that it is not the case is warranted.

Also while the statements about what most or newbie computer users prefer may be correct where is it written in stone that this is the goal of UI design. Consider the dewey decimal system' it is certainly less approachable than the more simple system of arranging books alphabetically by title but because it locates similar subjects next to each other it is clearly a superior system. The very notion that it might be good to coerce users to a new metaphor (by perhaps making it the default) argues that it might sometime be in the interests of ultimate productivity to convince simple users to learn a more powerful interface. For instance mixing spatial and navigational aspects (maybe one spatial and one navigator browser...distingushed by window color or something....maybe this already exists) might give users more power even if it sometimes presented more options (and thus more confusion) when they first began using. It almost seems as if GNOME has the unstated goal, not of serving the interests of the current user group or at least not the developer ones in online communities, and instead creating a UI to let linux steal users from microsoft. It would be foolish to deny that a great deal of linux's success is due to it's nuts and bolts feal and attractiveness to power-users so we should probably give proposals, like Ali's, which seek to turn a system into a more hacker friendly/bare bones system serious thought.

I simply don't find the claims made that mixing metaphors is necesserily bad very convincing (although unlike many of the posts here these were at least good points). For one it seems that humans can get used to quite bizarre and ad-hoc schemes/metaphors given time so at most we are debating about how easy it is to learn. As I pointed out above it is hardly clear that this really is what we ought to maximize. Furthermore, people employ mixed metaphors all the time with great ease. Consider a filing cabinet at a buisness that groups employment records by year in differnt cabinets and employee name in the cabinet. Also (with some fear of being smitten for blasphemy) I am given to question the real utility of interaction metaphors. Should we really take the significant evidence that many people don't understand the hierarchiecal metaphor of files and folders as proving that this simple concept is just beyond their grasp and they are in need of the even simpler spatial metaphor? Perhaps it just means alot people just don't understand the machine via these metaphors. What evidence supports the metaphor as being the most significant facet in UI rather than other things like number of options, appropriate names/help (i.e. why couldn't the anecdotes about people finding the spatial systems easier to use be simply because Music, Text, and Video are fewer options than are given to them in a navigational setting and the metaphor is irrelevant).

So in my prior post I complained that I hadn't really seen the issues addressed. I was afraid it would go over length so here are some specific questions Ali's proposal brought to mind that I would enjoy seeing discussed.

-Should we be coercing people to a new UI choice by making spatial nautilus default (if they weren't coercing they would just have an option pop up (with a suggested answer) when each user starts gnome for the first time). Similarly with the capplet question.

-In the same vein what user base should we really be targeting. Do we want a system that is best for the average computer user, the average linux user, a power user or some sort of comprimise? Is the project specifically targeted to gain mainstream market share (in which case we should be copying windows metaphors right or wrong) or to be some sort of theoretically perfect UI (in which case the argument for simplicity vs. power becomes much more unclear)

-Some people didn't seem to understand why someone might object to the idea of a centralized configuration system. I for one would be concerned that it would have similar problems to the registry (irregardless of the method of access) such as entires not being cleaned up. Also the very existance of a backend configuration database encourages the idea that it will be accessed primarily by programs and not by hand which ultimately encourages programs to create a ton of uninteligeable options even if nothing about the new system 'theoretically' makes it less accesible by hand. Finally the only reason to have a centralized config system in the first place is to allow programs to share information via the system and I worry that this might introduce more instability into the system. Using .config files makes a security slip up where you modify a key someone else relies on less likely. I'm not convinced (nor is he) that overall this is a bad thing but there are clearly issues to be discussed (policy...when should you use gconf as well as code).

-Finally his point about code bloat is once again a valid question of direction. Do we want to get the most functionality as quickly as possible or concentrait on building a stable elegant base. I'm not alledging there is a stability problem in gnome (I just don't know haven't used it lately enough) but one could concentrate on revising the basic code/standards until they were particularly well developed (i.e. rewriting the old base) or adding new features. Also should development concentrate on making packages dependent on the minimum installed base reasonable or instead push the entire gnome package together (potentially propagating instability) encoraging fastest development over slimness.

Ultimately, like any reasonable call for a code split (aside from incompetance of the development team) the issues he raises are primarily ones of direction and ultimate goals. Ali wants to focus on visual and code elegance targed at the power user while the gnome team seems more interested in UI consistancy (i.e. consistancy of the metaphors not the chrome) values fast development over systemic elegance (multiple interfaces to do the same thing....this is not necessarily a bad thing...sometimes the inelegant solution is the most practical) and appeal to some notion of the 'average computer user' (although I can't really explain why. If they were really interested in gaining market share in the US/developed world wouldn't it better serve them to copy microsoft UI deciscions? Perhaps it is better to target the developing world but it is a valid question).

Perhaps the term "bloat" gets misused, and the correct term is overkill. However, when you look at such an application as gnome-terminal an see it eat someting like 20MB ram, when you are used to aterm using < 1, bloat is the automatical associasion.

"It'd be nice if you didn't take statements out of context:"

If I did, I'm sorry -- things tend to get messy when you try to think, when you really should sleep..

"I never set out to prove WindowMaker/Fluxbox was bloated."

Well, you did claim that there would be large redundancies, wich could be translated as bloat I guess.

"...quite a bit of redundancy in there."

The rest of the apps are console apps, and thus not very interesting. But what is interesting is "is it possible to stick with one toolkit?" As I pointed out, at least in the past it was not doable to stick with qt only, so you ended up with all three toolkits anyway. Gnome was better in that way, but it has other unpleasant drawbacks.

"In a more common desktop,"

This we have already agreed on.

"I said that proponents of those programs couldn't really levy the "bloated" claim against KDE and GNOME."

This we have already been through. See the first paragraph.

"Just functionality, if you consider that features designed to serve less knowledgable users"

Different opinion again. Those features are like supporting wheels on a five-year-olds bike. They are not part of the bike and they are not necessary, but they make the process a bit less painfull. But it's quite obvious that the bigger apps you use the more they will gain by shareing code with other apps. KOffice compared to OpenOffice is a nice example.

"you cannot justifiably criticize GNOME and KDE of being bloated"

And with this we are back to the beginning again. It all depends on how you define "bloat". Unneeded stuff is bloat in my mind. Maybe I got the definiton wrong, but a terminal emulator that needs 20M ram does seem to fit the description. Sure it does more stuff than a simple aterm, but 20x ..? And before somone jumps me.. I know that gnome-term doesn't == gnome. But it is a very visible part of it.

"It was you who implied that one-size fit all"

I certainly did not. Where did I write that you'd have to surrender you SUSE box within 2 weeks or face the consequences?

"that KDE and GNOME were bloated."

I'd say what bloat is, is as much a matter of opinion as it is a technical one. I never said that the ideas behind KDE and Gnome were bad or unhealty, but the implementation isn't always all that great. Yeah, I know, "work in progress", but this is about what we have now, and not in two years.

"Systems that need to be general are not bloated."

Maybe. But to reverse a bit. What does Gnome offer that windows 2000 does not? My old "Senilix" has been running w2k quite happily, and yet gnome made it *crawl*.

Unneeded stuff is bloat in my mind.
The key question is what do you mean by unneeded, or more appropriately, unneeded according to whom? If all you need is MS Paint, then Photoshop is bloated. But for a graphics pro, all that bloat is absolutely necessary features. So it'd be stupid to say that Photoshop was bloated.

There are not a whole lot of superfluous features in KDE/GNOME. Component parts are critical in allowing different applications to share functionality (eg: HTML widget). Network-transparent filesystems (KIO, GNOME-VFS), are needed features. Networking libraries are needed features. KDE, in particular, has no marketing department to satisfy. The features in KDE's core libraries are there because developers want them, which means that their applications use them. Just because *you* don't need them, doesn't mean that everyone else doesn't need them. Ergo, you can't say that these are unneeded features.

gnome project need
1) stop stupid binding (sorry guys ) perl ruby php python java
2) implement mono ASP.NET ADO.NET yo yo
fuck off all patent problems with debian i install
all features on the fly without buy any distros.
3) more power of choice to user
4) gconf out or at least rewrite most of all parts.
at this time it's suck.
5) winfs copy,we need a system like winfs for file organization.
6) features features features
7) there are many good gnome developers but they lack of
leadership,too many zealots on the mailing lists.

first of all i want to explain how hard it is to write this, it means i should stop using my shift key. i hope it is useful and tells you what the secret CABAL of the goneme project is.

lots of us in the gnome project try to make gnome easy to use, and spend lots of effort trying to help people who use computers. like not EVERYBODY is going to be the expert at linux? but other people still can use computers even easier.

but some people try to stop us. the goneme project is now dominated by one person with too many ego. he wants to pretend he was PART OF GNOME PROJECT well no he insulted people who have never seen him do any work on gnome by using their name to apply to the several-hundred people strong gnome foundation. And on mailing lists he comes and insults other people too i mean he has bad attitude.

if you think about this it is why gnome is forked to goneme, i mean he cant work with other people and he has ideas about gconf and button order without even understanding that button order is not the main part of GNOME HIG. and he picks on individual people some of which are my friends to be rude to and ignores questions in mailing lists. i mean he cant work with other people so he has to do fork, that is my idea.